An Update on the Matchmaking Live Test

As you may have seen last week, we enabled the End of Round (EOR) Matchmaking on the live servers. While we have tested this ourselves internally, there is never a substitution for a live environment.

The test itself gave us some good insight, learnings and while it’s currently over we are planning to do another. This next test is currently scheduled to go live this week.

So, what did we learn?

Our game clients (your game that you run) behaved well. This is important as there is always a risk of technical hangs (freezing, crashes) and other similar behaviour that is unwanted. The fact that we saw no knock-on effects in this department is positive.

Smaller game modes, such as Heroes vs Villains and Hero Showdown performed well under the EOR Matchmaking. The games filled up a lot quicker than previously, which was good to see.

The EOR Matchmaking helped alleviate an issue where slots in the game were reserved for players that had quit back to the front end (main menu). This issue has a knock-on effect of slowing down back fill (players joining the game). Another positive.

We did notice reports that players would sometimes end up in games with very little people. This usually happened for the larger scale modes such as Galactic Assault. The team are working on some fixes to stop this from happening.

Playing the same map twice in a row was also identified and this isn’t by design. While there is always going to be a chance you’ll play the same map twice, we believe it needs to be a rare occurrence.

We’ve also identified an issue with Extraction, which caused the EOR Matchmaking to behave incorrectly, and subsequently fail.

More to come on this, but we wanted to let you know what was happening. As always, thanks for all the feedback, we’ll check back in shortly.

Well, I did not encounter a single EOR Matchmaking in the past week even though I played several games that desperately needed it.

OFF-TOPIC: Can you please fix Dx12 version of the game? Last patch totally broke it. Right now there is nobody playing in Dx12, some people that played hundreds of hours in Dx12 could not even launch the game with Dx12 enabled and had to manually edit setting files to disable it, others lucky enough to start the game report terrible instability and random crashes after few minutes of gameplay. This is a huge frick-up that needs to be addressed. I can't say the game looks hideous in Dx11, but compared to Dx12 it is ugly.

Just FYI, when I played Starfighter Assault while the test was active, I got put into empty lobbies every other game pretty much 100% of the time, it wasn't just a "sometimes" thing. On PS4. Also, one thing that I didn't see addressed in your report here was the problem that friends playing together were either being separated or kicked out of the games. That really needs to be addressed before going live with another test.

Smaller game modes, such as Heroes vs Villains and Hero Showdown performed well under the EOR Matchmaking. The games filled up a lot quicker than previously, which was good to see.

Lobbies might have filled faster, but I think you're underestimating the user experience and putting too much weight on that raw metric. I played a lot of Hero Showdown and HvV during the matchmaking test, and it was NOT good. Me and my team were being moved a lot around different lobbies, sometimes even getting our party split between different matches.

Aggregate data may have showed it "performed well", but the user experience on our end was simply terrible. Just look at the matchmaking test thread to see how unhappy people were about it.

Thanks for the communication, and your efforts in making matchmaking better.

Can you explain a bit more how your algorithm works (broadly speaking, no proprietary details), just so we know what to expect? Does it determine matches based off of each player's historical performance, or based off of star card level, or based off of recent preformance (last 10 games or so). I noticed when I played that it took a few matches of steam rolling the other team before the matchmaking kicked in and put me into more competitive matches. Was that a coincidence or is that how you expect the algorithm to work in the future?

IMO HVV and Showdown need to stay exactly the same. The End of Round matchmaking split up teams that were playing well together in a Small mode, and it didn't allow you to "Rematch" the team that just beat you. Which is fun, to get revenge.

The lobbies need to fill faster after someone quits, but overall I feel HVV and Showdown do not need this EOR matchmaking.

Would you consider removing the End-Of-Round match-making and make the system shuffle players and add new players when a new map loads? I think this would work better (for SA at least) and keep the map rotation intact.

the bigger issue I think is the quality of matches it finds. I'm put I to full games but if it's a stomp then it's really not fun. I noticed that bad teams of randoms are left together no shuffling for solo que. so we keep getting wrecked over and over unless I manually quit and try matchmaking to a new game.

I don't know if the new matchmaking is live on Xbox at the moment (I haven't seen a matchmaking button) but I've mainly been playing HvV over the past week or so and the matchmaking is utter garbage. Worst I've ever seen it, losing every match by 8-10 points.

And yeah, I know: gitgud. But I'm happy to admit that I'm not a top tier player. That shouldn't mean I get matched every single time against teams full of fully maxed heroes/villains. I literally don't have a single star card for ANY hero on either side, so I have to question why I'm clearly being matched every time with players on a similar level to myself against players that are clearly better.

I got one game on, I think Saturday night, that came down went 16 or 17 rounds and it was like a breath of fresh air. That shouldn't be the exception though, surely?

Something that needs to be looked at is the bahavior of all the weapons in regards to recoil...... part of what made battle front 1 more enjoyable is that the weapons fired just like what we see in the movies which is little to no recoil. The fully auto weapons should not have such a wide spread. In attack of the clone wars everyone’s weapons fire in a very straight line.
Another great idea to try is lets make only the abilities class specific and not items such as grenades and auto cannons etc. consider adding the option to level up the weapon attachments, get more than 3 to pick from, and an option to sacrifice a starcard slot for an extra weapon attachment.
And personally i would like to see a shot placement buff for the NT242, center shot on the heart should cause 150 damage and kill all classes except the heavy,

Yeah, it's almost always been pretty bad. People on the forums mention a time where there was minimal team shuffling before a new map loaded (after one attack/defend cycle) but that was a long time ago. During the beta, I think. I've personally never witnessed it.

I appreciate the update and the pulse of communication. But the body still needs work.......

That all said communicating keeps things moving. I think much of us would like to know what you expect to achieve and how?

And I reference the body/content because when matchmaking comments were made last month the sentiment I gleaned is balance. Yes there are people quitting in droves but that is due to the imbalance in the first place. From what I see the matchmaking simply allows you to quit a match where it was lopsided and into a new game. It would appear to me that there is no algorithm, simply the hope that by some opting out of games balance will come. I can't see that happening.

If it is difficult to implement a system whereby say the top 3/4 players switch with bottom after a planet change than just say so; though wasn't that how BF15 was? Couldn't that model easily be incorporated?

how about just shuffling players according to score at the end of a set of rounds (map played twice attack/defend)

at the end you add up all the scores and rank everybody 1-40.

for the next round:

number 1,3,5,7, ... go to one team
numbers 2,4,6,8, ... go to the other team

play 2 rounds of attack/defend

rinse repeat

I have seen the above suggestion many times. This unfortunately does not accommodate three major elements:

* Players who excel on one map vs another
* Friends playing in groups or online together
* Players who quit before end of game

Something that simple can also be manipulated easily so top players purposely end even or odd. Ultimately unbalancing the next match to play together.

It is not even "manipulating" but they are things which you just can't account for in a mathematical formula, which is why the matchmaking trial had such poor outcomes. Of all the games of star fighter assulkt I played during the trial only 16% of them saw enough players in the same lobby with me to be able to continue the next round post matchmaking. All the others saw significant delay in filling the lobby, or us all quitting to go and look for a new game.
Shuffling of players within the lobby, or a server browser would be the most efective ways to go as, if they try another similar formula based matchmake like the trial I suspect it will have the same poor outcomes experienced during the trials (namely teams still being unbalanced drastically and/or being sent to near empty lobbies).

As you may have seen last week, we enabled the End of Round (EOR) Matchmaking on the live servers. While we have tested this ourselves internally, there is never a substitution for a live environment.

The test itself gave us some good insight, learnings and while it’s currently over we are planning to do another. This next test is currently scheduled to go live this week.

So, what did we learn?

Our game clients (your game that you run) behaved well. This is important as there is always a risk of technical hangs (freezing, crashes) and other similar behaviour that is unwanted. The fact that we saw no knock-on effects in this department is positive.

Smaller game modes, such as Heroes vs Villains and Hero Showdown performed well under the EOR Matchmaking. The games filled up a lot quicker than previously, which was good to see.

The EOR Matchmaking helped alleviate an issue where slots in the game were reserved for players that had quit back to the front end (main menu). This issue has a knock-on effect of slowing down back fill (players joining the game). Another positive.

We did notice reports that players would sometimes end up in games with very little people. This usually happened for the larger scale modes such as Galactic Assault. The team are working on some fixes to stop this from happening.

Playing the same map twice in a row was also identified and this isn’t by design. While there is always going to be a chance you’ll play the same map twice, we believe it needs to be a rare occurrence.

We’ve also identified an issue with Extraction, which caused the EOR Matchmaking to behave incorrectly, and subsequently fail.

More to come on this, but we wanted to let you know what was happening. As always, thanks for all the feedback, we’ll check back in shortly.

Thanks for the update.
No mention of what it did to SA?
Because of player count I would say SA should be considered a smaller mode, and the MM absolutely ruined it. We would get 1 and a half to two complete matches, then end up in an empty server. I think this was important enough to be mentioned or at least acknowledged?

I am grateful you guys are working on it, but what happened this past go around was just awful for GA and SA...

FYI ur matchmaking for hvv has gotten worse last few days. I'm good but I can't carry a whole team of noobs against pros. Stop putting me with players named baby seal and I love cookies while the other team is deathkiller12 and noobhunter.

I'm sorry, but this "feature", like so many other things in the game just doesn't work. I play primarily Blast. While this little experiment was running, for the 80-90 min I was logged in, I maybe got to play for 30-40 min. I was constantly having to disconnect to find a full server. When I did find one, once the round was over it shuffled everyone around and I had to go hunting all over again. Please, for the love of Leia, do not implement this "feature".

FYI ur matchmaking for hvv has gotten worse last few days. I'm good but I can't carry a whole team of noobs against pros. Stop putting me with players named baby seal and I love cookies while the other team is deathkiller12 and noobhunter.

Same, its making hvv unplayable. Always put with new players while. The other team is all level 40's with an occasional new player. I aint no one man army.

FYI ur matchmaking for hvv has gotten worse last few days. I'm good but I can't carry a whole team of noobs against pros. Stop putting me with players named baby seal and I love cookies while the other team is deathkiller12 and noobhunter.

Many of the last few HvV game matchmakings was unfair, 80% of the games were unbalanced because of level 35 and above heroes/ pro players. And 20% actually balanced, I keep joining unfair matches when the opposite team has more skilled players. There should be skilled based matchmaking or something to fix this because it's getting annoying. I love to support this game but if the matches are unbalanced for new players and casual players I cant support this game anymore.

how about just shuffling players according to score at the end of a set of rounds (map played twice attack/defend)

at the end you add up all the scores and rank everybody 1-40.

for the next round:

number 1,3,5,7, ... go to one team
numbers 2,4,6,8, ... go to the other team

play 2 rounds of attack/defend

rinse repeat

I have seen the above suggestion many times. This unfortunately does not accommodate three major elements:

* Players who excel on one map vs another
* Friends playing in groups or online together
* Players who quit before end of game

Something that simple can also be manipulated easily so top players purposely end even or odd. Ultimately unbalancing the next match to play together.

Surely it is nearly impossible to beat this? How to make sure you are definitely even or odd!
Other than that, the whole idea is you will get the top 10-20 players distributed around.
So that at least the next 2 rounds last longer than 5 minutes.
And it really doesn't matter if you are good in one map but not the other. If you get 24,000 BP, you are not a bad player overall! If you distribute 10 players who score 10,000-25,000 points, it doesn't matter, you will get a reasonable game.

how about just shuffling players according to score at the end of a set of rounds (map played twice attack/defend)

at the end you add up all the scores and rank everybody 1-40.

for the next round:

number 1,3,5,7, ... go to one team
numbers 2,4,6,8, ... go to the other team

play 2 rounds of attack/defend

rinse repeat

I have seen the above suggestion many times. This unfortunately does not accommodate three major elements:

* Players who excel on one map vs another
* Friends playing in groups or online together
* Players who quit before end of game

Something that simple can also be manipulated easily so top players purposely end even or odd. Ultimately unbalancing the next match to play together.

Surely it is nearly impossible to beat this? How to make sure you are definitely even or odd!
Other than that, the whole idea is you will get the top 10-20 players distributed around.
So that at least the next 2 rounds last longer than 5 minutes.
And it really doesn't matter if you are good in one map but not the other. If you get 24,000 BP, you are not a bad player overall! If you distribute 10 players who score 10,000-25,000 points, it doesn't matter, you will get a reasonable game.

And if that is not the only way, well, have 3 ways of matchmaking! That way nobody will be able to know what's coming next. And the people suffering will know that at some stage, something will change.

It's actually fascinating that you guys are going to re-enable this. It was absolutely awful and did not perform well at all for HvV on PS4.

The idea behind the matchmaking in this game in general is awful. If you're a great HvV player, the game will attempt to give you three worst random teammates it can find, while putting you up against a team of solid, coordinated players. That's not balanced. It should try to put at least two good players on each team.

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It's actually fascinating that you guys are going to re-enable this. It was absolutely awful and did not perform well at all for HvV on PS4.

The idea behind the matchmaking in this game in general is awful. If you're a great HvV player, the game will attempt to give you three worst random teammates it can find, while putting you up against a team of solid, coordinated players. That's not balanced. It should try to put at least two good players on each team.

Many of the last few HvV game matchmakings was unfair, 80% of the games were unbalanced because of level 35 and above heroes/ pro players. And 20% actually balanced, I keep joining unfair matches when the opposite team has more skilled players. There should be skilled based matchmaking or something to fix this because it's getting annoying. I love to support this game but if the matches are unbalanced for new players and casual players I cant support this game anymore.

Please fix the matchmaking.

But also just because someone is lvl 35 or above doesn't mean they are actually good. We need random player shuffling. That is the only fair way to do it. I don't care about friend parties. They have an unfair advantage because you know they are in group chat making it unfair against non partied players. The only ones that argue this is the ones in parties taking the unfair advantage. Then they cry and moan but I want to play with my friends. You can but it might be against them or with them. Either way if you're in the same room you are playing with them. Personally I think it's more fun to kill your friends than be on the same team.

I wonder what is used for matching logic behind the scenes. I know in some other competitive games they use Elo but it really only matters if there is a healthy population of players. There has to be some logic use to determine what team to match you on. I hope its not just to fill games because that is probably one of the absolute last resorts for match-making. What about doing a solo que for those who dont want to go against groups of pre-mades of more than a few players? i've seen this in other games and it seemed to work okay, again splitting population but cant be already at rock bottom with player base levels. What about solo que and competitive or just casual/competitive ques so that at least you could get into a pool of players with people who might share some of the same priorities?

I don't know if the new matchmaking is live on Xbox at the moment (I haven't seen a matchmaking button) but I've mainly been playing HvV over the past week or so and the matchmaking is utter garbage. Worst I've ever seen it, losing every match by 8-10 points.

And yeah, I know: gitgud. But I'm happy to admit that I'm not a top tier player. That shouldn't mean I get matched every single time against teams full of fully maxed heroes/villains. I literally don't have a single star card for ANY hero on either side, so I have to question why I'm clearly being matched every time with players on a similar level to myself against players that are clearly better.

I got one game on, I think Saturday night, that came down went 16 or 17 rounds and it was like a breath of fresh air. That shouldn't be the exception though, surely?

Our game clients (your game that you run) behaved well. This is important as there is always a risk of technical hangs (freezing, crashes) and other similar behaviour that is unwanted. The fact that we saw no knock-on effects in this department is positive.

Sorry, but since you started testing I get constant crashes. Either at the end of round when the client will simply shutdown without any error message, or I get stuck in infinite loading screen with the game "silently crashing"
(I only recognize because the frames get freezed at 110-120 in the loading screen, while usually jumping up and down when switching maps.)

Yesterday I played from 10pm - 11:40pm with a friend and my game crashed at least four times. It was never nearly this bad before. The client was always really stable for me, running smooth like a hutt on wet floor.

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I do have some detail data in excel which I keep for personal stats only. My data from last 30 days shows when I play HvV with my party(friends) and I send the game, we get top ranking players most of the time about 80% of the time(full parties with players about my same or better skill level), if someone else from my party sends the HvV game it does not get premium players, almost never, less than 10% of success here, just regular player or bad players, still trying to find the logic here, but numbers do not lie, I am not expecting EA to divulge info about this algorithm in detail but at least we should get a glimpse what to expect if possible, I am the best skill player in my group, with better stats and hours played by far. My team mates keep bugging me to send the HvV game all the time instead of them. I am suspecting matchmaking is based on players historical performance, star card levels and last recent performance games(10-15 last games or so). We have spent countless hours playing HvV since release. Just my 2 cents here.